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Comment by bigiain | Hacker News Reader

It's also always been legal to say "sorry, we never record any of that information". You can get a warrant asking a bartender to provide you with names, addresses, and arrival and departure times, and transcripts of every conversation of every patron of his bar, and he can stand up in court and say "sorry, I don't have that information, and I'm not prepared to start collecting it.". Would you be happy for the FBI to be able to compel a bar owner to start collecting those records for everybody who walks into his bar? Without letting either new patrons or regulars know he was doing so?

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>You can get a warrant asking a bartender to provide you with names, addresses, and arrival and departure times, and transcripts of every conversation of every patron of his bar

No, you can't; the courts don't issue warrants like that. They'd issue a warrant for that information for one particular patron whom they already had reasonable suspicion of.

If the FBI have a warrant to put a bug on one regular's table, that doesn't seem unreasonable. If the bartender's carefully built the bar so that you can hear every conversation from every table and so the only way you can place a bug is one that would also record everyone else's conversations... yeah, I'd say that's unfortunate (and pretty poor design on the owner's part), but the FBI has the right to place the bug they've got the warrant for, and if there's really no way to do that without it picking up other conversations then too bad.

The nature of email is that the government's methods would simply collect all users' data, regardless of whether it was the target's or not. This would be true regardless of Lavabit being designed with user protection in mind or not, unless specialized methods such as those Levison offered to write were employed. Such methods would necessarily vary from provider to provider, because each provider is set up differently. The government simply defaults to massive collection in all cases so they don't have to write that or pay someone to write it. He offered to give them a means to get only the data they asked for, but they turned that down.

It's also always been legal to say "sorry, we never record any of that information"

Only if it is true. He has the data, the article says he has worked with law enforcement before in a kiddie porn case.

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